The
Seven Deadly Sins: Lust
2nd
Samuel 11:2-5; 12:1-7
Ephesians 5:3-5
Matthew
5:28
John 8:2-12
I: -- The
child loves her pet rabbit. In
fact she never speaks of it as a rabbit.
She insists it’s a bunny, not a rabbit.
(There’s a big difference, you know, between a bunny and a
rabbit.) Along comes a
thoughtless adult who prides himself on his superiority and
sophistication. He looks at
the bunny and says, “Where did you get that thing?
It’s only a rodent, you know, nothing more than a rodent.”
The child is heartbroken, angry and frustrated at once.
Even as she knows she’ll never be able to convince this oafish
adult that her bunny isn’t “nothing more than a rodent”, deep down
in her heart she knows that her beloved bunny can never be reduced to
his front teeth. She knows
that if she ever regarded her bunny as nothing more than his front
teeth, her dearest treasure would be worthless.
Love recognizes worth.
Love cherishes worth. Love
magnifies worth. Love never
says “nothing more than”. Love
never cheapens worth until something precious is a throwaway item to be
discarded without a second thought.
Lust, however, is just the opposite.
Lust degrades and keeps on degrading until something is
disposable.
II: -- Before
we proceed with the distinction between love and lust we have to say
something about human libido. We
have to acknowledge that when God creates item after item, each time
pronouncing it “good”; when God creates man and woman and then
pronounces them “very
good”, the “very good” includes human libido.
When the book of Proverbs speaks approvingly, glowingly, of the
mystery of “the way of a man with a maid”, Proverbs is underscoring
the declaration in Genesis: human libido is God-ordained and therefore
good.
At the same time, we must understand that
human libido serves human intimacy in the first place.
It’s different with the animals: in the animal world libido
serves reproduction, and reproduction only.
In the human world libido serves reproduction, obviously, but not
reproduction only and not reproduction primarily.
In the human sphere libido serves the fusing of a man and a
woman. The nature of this
fusion is a union that aims at, intends, lifelong fidelity in a
relationship so very intimate, intertwined, interpenetrating that it can
be terminated only by death. Libido
serves this end. Libido
serving any other end is what we call lust.
Love exalts humans; lust diminishes humans.
On the one hand lust reduces the person who is lusted after to a
tool, a toy, a play thing that we can exploit and exploit and then
discard. On the other hand
lust also reduces the person who lusts to one appetite, one craving.
Love is always concerned to see the whole person thrive.
Lust reduces the whole person lusted after to one aspect of her
even as lust reduces the person lusting to one itch.
Not so long ago an Argonaut football player
was interviewed following a
Toronto
victory. He was exhilarated
with the victory and his part in it.
He concluded his interview as he said to the reporter “Now I
want a woman.” But he
didn’t want a woman. A
woman, after all, is a person, a human being of intelligence and
profundity and mystery; a human being made in the image of God whom we
can’t violate without violating him and without violating ourselves.
The Argonaut player didn’t want this; he wanted his itch
scratched.
II: -- Really,
it’s not as difficult to distinguish love and lust as some people
think. In fact there are
several telltale features that identify love unmistakably.
[a] In the
first place love has inherent durability.
Love lasts beyond ten minutes not because love ought to last but
because it’s love’s nature to last.
Love doesn’t flit, like a bee flitting from one flower to
another, extracting whatever it can before alighting on the next flower
for the next extraction. Love
doesn’t alight and leave, alight and leave.
Love has inherent durability.
Lust, on the other hand, dies at dawn.
It may quicken the next night, to be sure, but just as surely it
dies the following dawn. Jean
Paul Sartre, French philosopher and novelist, used to speak of lust as a
“mere twitch.” Love,
however, doesn’t twitch; love lasts.
A major ingredient in love’s
perdurability is romance. Romance
is hard to find these days. There’s
no time or place for romance when the casual relationship moves to the
bedroom by the second date. Several
years ago when the Shepherd family was camping in a provincial park on
the shore of Lake Ontario I noticed that there were no young couples
strolling up and down the beach hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm.
Romance had disappeared. Courting
had disappeared. Enchantment,
stardust, charm – all of it was gone.
Of course it’s gone. Romance
and courting and enchantment are long gone when 18-year olds are seen
emerging from the tent the morning after.
Tragically, if there’s no romance when we
are 18, there will be none when we are 28 or 38 or 48.
Romance lends love resilience and rigour.
[b] A second feature of love, identifying
it as love for those in love and for those who see others in love; a
second feature is interwoven, intertwined involvement.
Rebecca West, a British novelist with much to say, maintains that
love is a journey into another land.
Two people who have pledged themselves to each other and become
fused in a relationship that aims at being terminated only by death; two
such people know that their life together is a land that awaits them, a
land to be explored and shared and enjoyed together.
Lust, however, isn’t the slightest bit interested in exploring
a new land over the next several decades.
Lust laughs off any talk of a new land.
Lust has no concern past tonight, and even then no more than a
concern with tonight’s tool or trinket or toy.
Everyone appears jarred when the 30-year
olds who have been married only three years decide to end their
marriage. Three years ago
they assumed that the huge attraction they had for each other on one
front in life, the sexual, was so huge that there was neither time nor
inclination nor perceived need to explore other life-fronts.
Relatively quickly (within three years) they concluded that their
lives overlapped virtually nowhere apart from the sexual.
Lacking large areas of overlap in their lives, they concluded
(correctly) that they had little in common; too little, in fact, to
sustain a union. Lacking
significant areas of overlap in their lives, they quickly got to the
point where they couldn’t see anything in each other, or what they saw
they didn’t like. A new
land to be entered upon and explored and enjoyed together?
“Mythic lunacy” they now sneer cynically.
Romance always entails adventure.
They had never considered adventure.
All they had ever wanted was libidinal relief, only to learn that
this alone won’t sustain a union.
The opposite of interwoven, intertwined
involvement isn’t uninvolvement. The
opposite of such involvement is emptiness.
Those who fail to grasp that love entails profound involvement
don’t find themselves “free” in any sense; they find themselves in
a desert.
[c]
A third telltale of love is loyalty.
Loyalty, like romance, is increasingly hard to find.
Are people less loyal than they used to be?
Plainly yes. The real
tragedy, however, is that they are less able
to be loyal.
There is a truth here we do well to note everywhere in life.
The student who abandons the discipline of study; or the student
who never develops the discipline, the healthy, helpful routine of study
soon finds herself unable to
study. First she doesn’t,
then she can’t. If the
athlete decides to give up training for six months on the assumption
that he can recover competition-level conditioning three days before the
event, he finds that he can’t recover it in three days.
The worst consequence of disloyalty isn’t that we have been
disloyal (serious as this is); the worst consequence is that we’ve
diminished our ability to be
loyal. This is much more
serious. Unfaithfulness
doesn’t mean that all our love has been withdrawn on one occasion.
Unfaithfulness does mean, however, that our capacity to love has
eroded significantly. The
next instance of unfaithfulness or disloyalty, anywhere in life, will
erode it more and then more again (unless of course someone perceives
what’s happening inside him and is frightened enough to do something
about it).
I find contemporary Christians naïve right
here. We ought to look back
to another feature of mediaeval understanding, what our 13th
Century foreparents called “habit”.
They had in mind the Latin word “habitus”.
“Habitus” doesn’t mean what the English word “habit”
means. The English word
“habit” means “unthinking repetition.”
At best it means “unthinking repetition”.
At worst “habit” has to do with “habituation”: addiction.
The habituated person is the addicted person.
In mediaeval theology, however, “habit” (“habitus”) meant
“cumulative character”. Temptation
resisted in this moment is important to be sure, if only because sin has
been averted in this moment. But
temptation resisted in this moment is vital for another reason:
temptation resisted now forms and forges character wherein the same
temptation, encountered again, will be more readily identified and more
easily resisted. Resisted
again, it will then be even more readily identified and even more easily
resisted. There is a
cumulative gain here as character is deepened and strengthened and made
ever more resilient. This is
what our mediaeval foreparents meant by habit/habitus.
It all means this: the singular act of
loyalty today is the first brick in the edifice of loyalty.
The singular act of loyalty, in other words, is never merely
singular: it’s one more building block in that fortress which will
soon be found repelling assailants and repelling them for life.
In other words, just as it’s tragically
possible to erode one’s capacity for loyalty or truthfulness or
withstanding frustration of any sort, it’s also gloriously possible to
enlarge one’s capacity for loyalty or truthfulness or withstanding
frustration of any sort.
Loyalty, truthfulness, the capacity to
withstand disappointment and pain and hope-not-yet-fulfilled; these will
ever be one of the marks of love.
III:
-- What is a
Christian response to all of this? How
are we to situate ourselves in the midst of a society that appears
largely indifferent to the deadly sin of lust, and therein advertises
itself as mindlessly superficial compared to our mediaeval foreparents
who at least could recognize it for what it is?
[a]
In the first place we are going to do what
Christians should do in any case, in all times and places, concerning
anything: in the words of the apostle Paul, we are going to speak the
truth in love.
There are two deficits that mustn’t be
found in us here. One
deficit is speaking the truth but not speaking it in love.
Here the truth is used as a hammer whereby we can bludgeon those
who don’t agree with us. Or
the truth is used as a sword whereby we can defend ourselves when we
feel ourselves under attack – the sword being the weapon of choice to
those who are somewhat insecure in themselves and perhaps not quite
convinced that the truth of the gospel is true.
To say that we should speak the truth in love is to say that we
shouldn’t be shrill. We
shouldn’t carp.
But if we shouldn’t carp, neither should
we cower. In other words,
the second deficit shouldn’t be found in us either; namely, failing to
speak the truth. Of course
we ought not to brutalize others with the truth; but neither do we
apologize for the truth. And
for this reason we shall not be cowed concerning the distinction the
gospel makes between lust and love, why the former is deadly sin and why
the latter is the fulfilment of all that God requires of us.
According to the gospel, marriage remains the
context for sexual intimacy. I
do not apologize for saying this. According
to the swelling army of sociologists, pre-marital co-habitation does not increase one’s likelihood of remaining married; it decreases
it. According to
self-evident logic, there is no more “trial marriage” than there is
“trial parachute jump”. Once
the parachutist has jumped, it’s not a trial of any sort; it’s the
real thing. Until the
parachutist has jumped; as long as the parachutist remains in the
airplane, he hasn’t jumped in any sense.
In the same way trial marriage is an oxymoron, an inherent
self-contradiction. Until we
have committed ourselves irrevocably in marriage, we aren’t
“married” in any sense; once we have committed ourselves
irrevocably, there’s no “trial” aspect to it; it’s the real
thing.
I shall not fall silent on the fact that
the single largest reason for infertility in women is pelvic
inflammatory disease (disease whose incidence is sky-rocketing), and the
single largest reason for pelvic inflammatory disease is promiscuity.
I don’t intend to beat anyone over the head with this, but I
also don’t see why I should pretend anything else.
To be sure, we must speak the truth in
love; and in order to speak the truth in love we have to be ready to
speak the truth.
[b]
What is a Christian response?
In the second place we should remember that everything we’ve
talked about today is so very riddled with anxiety and guilt for so many
people that we must hear again the gospel incident where some men bring
to Jesus a woman they have found committing adultery, “in the very
act”, they tell our Lord. They
remind our Lord that the Law of Moses requires the death penalty, and
then ask him, “Now what do you have to say?”
It’s a trap question. The
men don’t really care about the law of God or about the woman who has
violated it. They care only
about their own venomous hearts and the hostility they cherish
concerning Jesus. They want
to trap him.
If Jesus says “Stone the woman”, the
Roman police will arrest him since only Roman courts can impose the
death sentence in Roman-occupied
Palestine
. If, on the other hand,
Jesus says “Let her go”, these men will accuse him of blasphemy,
since he has denied the law of God to be God’s law.
It’s a trap.
Jesus, as always, doesn’t reply to their
question. Instead he bends
over and writes with his finger on the ground.
With his finger.
Every Israelite would have known what he was doing.
God was said to have written the Ten Commandments on the stone
tablets with his finger.
As Jesus writes on the ground with his finger, he is doing two
things: he is reinforcing the commandment forbidding adultery, and he is
claiming for himself that authority which belongs to God alone.
Then Jesus straightens up, looks at the men who are out to
“get” both woman and him, and says, “If any one of you men thinks
yourself to be without sin, you pick up a stone and throw it at her.”
The men slink away.
What’s happened here?
In writing with his finger on the ground and in thereby claiming
to speak and act with the authority of God, Jesus has upheld the
commandment forbidding adultery in the context of a woman who has
committed adultery. Therefore
she stands condemned. Nothing
else can be pretended. She
stands condemned by God, since only God can condemn.
Then Jesus announces, “I don’t condemn you.”
The condemnation the woman deserves has been rescinded, rescinded
by the only one who can rescind God’s condemnation, the one who is
God-with-us. Finally Jesus
warns her, “Never, ever do
it again.”
All of scripture either anticipates the
cross or looks back to the cross. In
the incident we are probing the cross is anticipated.
Jesus rescinds the woman’s condemnation knowing that he will
shortly bear in himself the condemnation that all of us deserve.
Today’s
sermon concludes the series on the mediaeval catena of The Seven Deadly
Sins. After one and one-half
of months of investigating sin we should depart the series with several
points in mind:
-sin is lethal at any time and therefore
deadly at all times;
-sin merits condemnation just because the claim and commandment of God
cannot be
relaxed;
-yet sin’s condemnation is borne by the crucified who
sets us free to sin no more just because the pardon he, the Son of God,
pronounces upon us is ratified by his Father in heaven.
In
short, you and are I summoned henceforth to die to
sin just because someone who loves us more than he loves himself has
already died for it.
Victor
Shepherd
March 2006
